An Interview: Mary Lovelace O'Neal with Faye Hirsch

In considering whether she would attend Skowhegan in 1963, Mary Lovelace O’Neal (1942-2026) faced an internal struggle. She had been attending Howard University since 1960 and, while there, was an activist with the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the undergraduate affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a major force in the Civil Rights movement. She grew up in an erudite milieu as her father, Ariel Lovelace, was a professor of music at two historically Black colleges, the Arkansas Agriculture, Mechanical & Normal College in Pine Bluff, and Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi. At Howard, she was a student in the Art Department, learning from esteemed faculty David Driskell, Loïs Maillou Jones and James A. Porter, among others. It was Driskell, a Skowhegan alum (1953), who recommended her for the program. That same year, students at Howard organized for the landmark March on Washington. Lovelace O’Neal’s decision to take the summer off to study art was therefore significant, indicating the importance she accorded to her artistic career at a young age. Her connections to the cause ran deep even during her summer in Maine. Her, then-boyfriend, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture)—later a major leader of SNCC in Mississippi—visited her at Skowhegan and reassured her about her choice to take a break from organizing.

Lovelace O’Neal spoke about these memories and more some sixty years later, via Zoom, from her home in Oakland (she lived between California and Mérida, Yucatán in Mexico). COVID-19 was raging, and her old friend and mentor Driskell had died from the disease three months prior. For Lovelace O’Neal, the loss was still raw. She had also just opened her first show in New York in twenty-five years at the Mnuchin Gallery. The show was a survey of five decades of work, and she expressed concern about visitor access to the exhibition, either live or online, during lockdown.

Faye Hirsch, art historian and curator

The interview has been edited from the original transcript of a Zoom conversation on July 21, 2020, between Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Faye Hirsch and Ingrid Schaffner, editors and contributors of In the Company of Artists: A History of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (forthcoming), and Paige Laino, former Alumni and Archive Manager at Skowhegan.

Faye Hirsch: I am so sorry about David Driskell. You knew him for a very long time and, if I’m not mistaken, he’s one of the reasons you went to Skowhegan.

Mary Lovelace O’Neal: Absolutely. I had some hard times with the department at Howard University, but he was somehow a person who understood very deeply what I was about and probably much more than I understood even about myself. And Mr. Porter had said, “Look out for her,” because I was having real trouble with Miss [Loïs Mailou] Jones. She didn’t want me to go to Skowhegan because, she said, “She’ll go up there and start trouble. Plus, she wears this dirty trench coat and those dirty sneakers and look at her hair.” She was very much against me going, but Mr. Driskell got in and really fought her, which was pretty interesting, actually, because he was a young and fairly new professor. Mr. Porter was also one of my arch enemies—or so I thought at that time. I had an interesting relationship with him.

FH: Yes, the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art, where you presented the paper as an honoree. (1) From nearly the start of Skowhegan, the school had ties to Howard, which would send a student every summer.

MLO: Howard was really quite a special place. But I would also say to you that because of being an African American institution, a Black institution, a Negro university from its inception, it had a very different kind of mission than most white universities. It saw us—those of us who were there—as the so-called “talented tenth.” We were the legacy of that. Very special attention was paid to us, and they expected great things. There was never a time when they didn’t believe in us, didn’t believe that we weren’t as good as any student in the country, in the world. I mean, they had that kind of security about who they were as a university. And then there’s all the other kind of stuff that we as students didn’t understand. But certainly, we were special. I have taught in a number of places over the years, and I really feel sorry in a way for my students, because they don’t have the special caring that we received.

Often it was overbearing. I had a really terrible critique once—I tell this story often, or, it occurs to me often. And I returned to the dorm and went to sleep for a week. That was the way I settled shit. I just went to sleep until it was better or gone. I missed classes, so Mr. Driskell came over to the dorm and said, “Tell Miss Lovelace I want her down here in 10 minutes.” I knew that was like, “Oh God, this man’s getting me out of my bed,” so I put on my trench coat over my pajamas, brushed my teeth and went down to meet him. He said, ”We’re going back to the department right now.” So, as we walked across campus, I’ll never forget, it was one of those weird kind of autumn half-sunshiny days, but a pleasant time to walk. I lived sort of in the city in one of those dorms—Slowe Hall.

We had a conversation. He said, “Look,” and I’ve never forgotten this and I’ve tried to teach in this way, “You can not be undone by a critique. You have to get back up the next day and come back again. You can think what they said was bullshit, or you can think about it and see if there was useful information or just put it in the back of your cap and let it be for a while to see what happens with it. But you cannot not come back. That doesn’t work. You have to get up and do it again and again, so that you can support what it is you believe in, what you think. And it may even be bullshit that you think and believe in, but you’ve got to be able to support it and support it until you know another way, or know that you seek another way.” He was like that. I have tried, as a teacher, not to immobilize my students. To make it certain that they just have to stand up for themselves and they have to come back again and again and again.

FH: You actually listened to him. You had grown up on the campus of a historically Black college in Mississippi, right? Tougaloo College?

MLO: And also in Arkansas. In Pine Bluff. I had grown up at Arkansas State University, or what is now Arkansas State University Pine Bluff. Back then it was Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College. My father was chair of the music department there. He had been prior to that at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi, and then he came to Tougaloo, which was really a hotbed—like Howard—of civil rights activity and student activity. If you don’t know about Tougaloo you really should, and you should investigate the wonderful collection that they had that is probably one of the best art collections anywhere in the country—Black or white, college or university. It included famous New York Action Painters like Pollock, de Kooning, Frankenthaler. Peter Selz, who had been Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, helped Ronald Schnell, who was then developing an art department at Tougaloo, to get that collection. There were people who poured in wonderful, incredible stuff. I’d need just to go through a good list to tell you that person and that person and that person gave really good pieces. Good pieces, not, you know, something they threw in the trash can to Tougaloo. Through some really unfortunate circumstances about ten years ago they started selling off the collection until some of us heard about it and put an end to it. They were selling these magnificent pieces for pennies because the people in charge of the finances and, you know, taking care of Tougaloo ran into some real hard times. Many of us found out about it, including Mr. Driskell and Selz, and any number of people. Movie stars, people who had become really important entities in this country for whatever they did, like really important researchers, scientists, doctors, lawyers and artists of great note. All of these people just said, “Oh, no, this won’t work.” I don’t know the actual status of the collection at this moment, what actually was saved. But I know that a good deal of it was saved before they were able to sell it off.

Ingrid Schaffner: It looks like Tougaloo got a great big grant from the Mellon Foundation in early 2020 to help care for the collection. (2)

MLO: I didn’t know that. I’ve been, in many ways, so out of touch with things, for a number of reasons. Usually, I kind of keep up with what’s going on there, but I haven’t in the last couple years. I’d be invited to speak or to critique work of young students. You know, because it’s home, and they were proud of me. I had made something of myself. I wasn’t that crazy girl they assumed I would be, who was so unruly.

FH: So, Driskell recommended you strongly for the Skowhegan program. You had come from these colleges in the South, and then Howard, and then you wound up in Maine at Skowhegan. Do you remember arriving at Skowhegan, and what that felt like?

MLO: I do remember some of it. I think if I were to speak with people who ended up being my dear friends I could remember more. But I remember getting off, I think it was a bus. And that bus put us off at some kind of store. It was maybe like dry goods, a store that had lots of different things. But I remember there was a blind door. I came out and this little towhead white kid was coming from the other direction and he was screaming.

FH: What?!

MLO: We were in Maine in 1963. Where the fuck was he gonna see a Black woman? One that looked like me? Maybe if they had a maid that would have been the case, but he was a little, little boy. And it wasn’t like even a scream of terror, it was just like, “Wow.” Like, you know, “They didn’t tell me about this.” It was that kind of thing.

I remember that. And it seems also that they sent a car or a little bus, not a bus but there used to be those wonderful Outbacks. They had wooden dashboards. They were very popular. I think there might have been a car like that, or a truck that wasn’t a truck. I don’t remember who was in the car with me, or if I was alone. They had apparently been told who would arrive and when, blah blah blah. We drove and drove and arrived at—I may be making all of this up. I probably am. I haven’t thought about it in years—we passed cows and baby cows. I made a note to myself, “I’m going to come and see them and talk to them.” And there was a barn on the right side as we were going towards the lake. That was the painting barn. I know that there was the sculpture yard on the left side of that drive. Then we went through almost an awning of trees that crossed over and shaded this path. These trees sort of joined hands across the road, almost like an arbor.

I remember how I got into where I lived—you had to go up steps. I was on the second floor and it overlooked the lake. (3) It was wooden, lots of wood. I had a room by myself; I guess we all did. I remember that there was never better food. I, and most of my mates, were so fat when it was time to come home that we couldn’t get in our clothes. I could barely get in my shoes. We had lobster. Everything was fresh: fresh milk, fresh breads every day. There must have been fresh pasta, fresh vegetables. In the morning baked goods that might have been cinnamon rolls or something delicious. And you ate like a pig. You just ate and ate and ate. There were only two things that you basically did, because there weren’t even enough boys so that you might be fucking somebody. And the teachers, there weren’t many of those either. My class was the first class back after the fire. (4) And so it was a very odd class because there were a greater number of women—as we would have been called at our great ages of nineteen and as much as twenty. I think Nancy Graves was about twenty. And Sandy Walker. (5)

And there was, another guy with a B name. It was a French name. And he had developed a big career at some point.

FH: Are you talking about Bruce Gagnier?

MLO: Bruce Gagnier. Exactly.

Sandy Walker was in my graduate class at Columbia. (6) But at Skowhegan, there weren’t enough boys—most of them were boys, compared to we women. Girls tend to mature more quickly than boys at that age. I mean, you know, guys. But it was a very affable group of folks. There was one other Black woman. Gina? We called her Jeano and I can’t remember her last name, but she came from St. Louis. (7)

***

Read more of Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s memories and reflections in the full interview, included as a PDF.

1. Artist James A. Porter (1905-1970) was closely involved in Howard University’s Department of Art from 1927 as first instructor, then eventually Chair of the department until his death. In 1943, he published his groundbreaking survey of 19^th and early 20^th century African American art history, Modern Negro Art. He, along with Loïs Maillou Jones, regularly recommended students to Skowhegan.
2. In addition to the Direct Art Collection Grant (2020), the Mellon Foundation continues to support Tougaloo College’s art collection. In 2022, it joined the American Federation of Arts and the Terra Foundation for American Art to fund a touring exhibition and catalogue of the collection.
3. This was Cummings dormitory, a large dormitory solely for female students, built prior to 1946. This is one of the original dormitories on campus, and it remains in use as of 2026.
4. The fire referenced took place during the end of the 1960 session. There was a session the following year in 1961, followed by a hiatus in 1962—one of only two in the school’s history—as officials assessed the status of the school. Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s year was the first after that hiatus. The second hiatus was in 2020, the year of this interview, during COVID-19.
5. There were forty-eight students in 1963. Nancy Graves was twenty-four years old.
6. Mary Lovelace O’Neal went on to earn her MFA from Columbia University in 1969.
7. This alum is listed in Skowhegan’s paper archives as Jean Nofles. Jean was a rising senior at Washington University in St. Louis.